Off-camera, Does your character have a life OFF the run? Options

[Kerenshara]

Some nice work there Octo.

Back in the days, at the end of my game sessions I usually asked what the characters were going to be doing until their next run. I encouraged people to work on their skills so they'd have an in game reason for advancement other than completing runs. Some would work on their social life and nurture connections. Some would go party and get wasted. And there's always the guy that wants to track down that next big gun or build a death machine.

This gives me easy material for game sessions. Some times we'd go a few sessions without using the traditional Shadowrun formula; the players would make the game themselves. The rigger needs some drones? Cool, time to go steal some drones. People wanted APDS ammo? Awesome, the hacker finds a shipment coming through loaded with APDS ammo (and a bunch of para-military nut jobs guarding it).

In a game I have been playing in for nigh on three years straight now, the GM says he loves us, because fully half the time, we tell him what WE'RE going to do that night. He HATES us because that means he's almost always having to make up the opposition on the fly. But this is EXACTLY why good backgrounds and "off-camera" interests and activities can be so valuable. And who knows where the hook for your next big score or wiz contact will find you?

[Stahlseele]

I have Problems doing Character Background and Connections. True enough.
I do NOT have Problems to give the horribly min/maxed twinked out combat monkey a bit of personality.
I usually try to spin my background as i play.
Some people might frown upon this, saying i am writing in stuff to get an Advantage or something.
They say it as if that were something BAD O.o . .
But if i get an idea or hear something i like/think i can adapt, then i am damn well going to use it <.<
The Woodworking bit for example. The Troll had a Camping Mobile/Yes, the Bison, nice Vehicle).
But it DOES get a bit crowded in there. He himself is a Crowd alone i guess *snickers*
Soo . . big, strong Hunter with a Faible for his Axes and Woodworking Skills . . why not i thought?
What did i think up again now? The idea that he was going to build his very own Block-House.
Out in the Woods. Search for a nice, dense part of the Woods, Cut down some Trees in one place.
Cut down some more trees in the surrounding area. Use them to build a wooden house.
Finally some place to stay at where he does NOT have to duck when going through a door.
And wooden houses are damn hard to find if the entire surrounding area is made from wood.

[Kerenshara]

I have Problems doing Character Background and Connections. True enough.
I do NOT have Problems to give the horribly min/maxed twinked out combat monkey a bit of personality.
I usually try to spin my background as i play.
Some people might frown upon this, saying i am writing in stuff to get an Advantage or something.
They say it as if that were something BAD O.o . .
But if i get an idea or hear something i like/think i can adapt, then i am damn well going to use it <.<

*grins*
Well, I guess I can't be surprised by any of this. As to spinning "advantage" out during play, tell them to slot themselves. Anything you get "advantaged" in during that scene, any competent GM will take out of your hide next time as payment - with a kiss, of course. And if it helps the storyline along in the mean time?! You go have fun with yo' bad self! If I can't get background, I will settle for a convincing, consistent and organic personality.

[The Jake]

I try to get my PCs to have a "life" outside of running. It's often very hard to get some players to treat their characters as more than 2D cutouts unfortunately.

Thankfully nearly all my players are making some effort -

The drake mystic adept spends time working with the PC initiatory group and very occasionally, heads out to night clubs and tries to pick up. Also likes forming good relationships with his contacts, including one Lone Star DPI detective that there seems to be a semi-romantic interest but otherwise unexplored for now (that relationship is blossoming and interesting to watch evolve I have to say).
The troll merc spends most of his spare time working on his arms dealing business on the side.
The eagle shapeshifter spends a lot of time with other shapeshifters trying to help them to get used to citylife.
The AI has a friend he is helping investigate a murder which resulting in the loss of said friend's family.
The human hermetic scholar spends time with the PC intiatory group and playing around his enchanting (bit of a book worm).

The only real exception in this group is the human assassin/spy, who at the very least has amnesia and some form of excuse. He has however displayed an interest in Biotech, Nanotech weaponry and Genetic Engineering and begun studying in interest (even if its only to find new/creative ways to geek people - its at least something).

In past campaigns we had PCs who had relationships. In one instance, the girl a PC was seeing was the ex-gf of a Yakuza soldier. I have some fun memories of said PC slipping out the window to avoid getting his ass kicked or worse.

Overall, my PCs don't really have much of a 'life' outside of running regrettably, although I do strongly encourage it. All PCs have at least one personal hook, which I use for subplots and as a basis to explore their character in more depth. I do push for them to have activities outside of running but the reality is most of them have such a full plate they would struggle with anything resembling a relationship.

- J.

[InfinityzeN]

My players are actually running something between 1/3 and 1/2 of the games as player driven, with the rest split evenly into downtime RP and actually GM built runs. Downtime RP is "So you guys got money in the bank and just finished a hellish two week job, what cha doing?". It also covers hanging with high loyalty contacts, clubbing, etc.


In the game I'm playing in (YEA! Finally after 10 years! WOOO HOOO!) I have an Ork gangbanger. He is into fast motorcycles and has a "dayjob" as a strip club bouncer. When he has down time, he of course drinks and chases tail. But he also goes to concerts and block parties, works on his bikes and car, goes out street racing, goes to track days, hits up the car and bike shows (every kind, from exotics to racing to classics), and cruises the beaches.

I guess I should post updated stats for him on here sometime since he is actually building up pretty fast. GM started us at 300BP and was giving out 10~12 karma a game.

[Chrysalis]

Sonya is a character I have played for a bit over a year now. She was re-awakened in the ACHE only recently. She does street racing in an old Renraku cop car. She recently went off to Boston for run and liked flying so much that when she came back she went off and took a parachute course.

When she is not busy with runs, she is drinking coffee at the local Stormbucks, hanging out with her friend mechanic Dreamer (who is scared silly of her), or working in the ACHE. She's squatting back in her old security level apartment there. Gotten to know some of the old residents from Deus's time and has started activating the old computer systems. She still does her usual patrols of the area and hunts and kills any adventurous looters.

There is a group of urban explorers she has befriended. Like her they are just curious with the place. The other group do base jumping off the pinnacle.

She's saving up for a pilot's license at the moment.

[Kerenshara]

Kerenshara’s newly returned to Seattle, and all her old contacts and friends - save one - think she’s dead in the rocket attack that killed her parents and lead to the late Awakening of her latent magical Talent, and at the moment it’s in her best interest to keep it that way. She's trying to come to grips with how her Talent has altered her perception of the world. She doesn’t have “weekends� and only acknowledges them as a custom most people keep so she can interact with the people around her - the bad guys won’t wait to hit you on a weekday, so don’t make it easy for them by dropping your guard. She runs and exercises extensively, but her usual past times are largely denied to her at the moment. The one thing she can still do is put on another identity and become somebody else in order to engage in a little casual extracurricular sex. Her deep interests right now are essentially different sides of the same coin: trying to better understand her Talent through self study and an attempt to find some kind of Center and inner peace - and she has been studying a number of philosophies with a strong emphasis on the Japanese, as her limited experience of Zen seems to hold an inner peace and serenity she desperately craves so she can face her challenges head on with clear vision. She has never known romantic love, and wouldn’t know it if it bit her on her perfectly formed behind. Above all of this is a bittersweet knowledge that prior to her Awakening, in trying to follow her parent’s path, she had a significant amount of bio and cyberware implanted in her body that now complicates and impedes her Talent. Her first kill was at the age of eleven - the man who ordered her grandmother's death in a car bomb to try to get to her Grandpa, while gagged and bound helpless in a chair. She never has understood her parent's apparent horror when she calmly handed the pistol back to Grandpa. She had always heard killing was hard... and she had followed Grandpa's One Rule. Grownups. Go figure.
Right now she's holding down a "day" job with a talent for singing she's never known she possessed at a little Norse themed pub two nights a week or so, and she's getting a little following already. The fact that it's not really her, is besides the point. She's always been an adrenaline junky, but since her Awakening she's turned more into a predator, taking pleasure in the stalk as well as the kill.

[Chibu]

Definitely do out of run roleplaying. It makes the characters so much more interesting.

Let's see... where to begin...

One of our first big campaigns, my character (Unarmed/Improvised weapons [Jackie Chan style] Physical Adept) Was very big into awakened botany. He would go out and look for interesting things, and bring them to his greenhouse, and started near the end to be a big name in the botany community. This actually helped us out one time, as we used one of the plants, along with some crazy antics to raise the background count of a building high enough do disrupt a rough toxic spirit (which was our job for that run). In this same campaign, another character (Pacifist snake shaman) was starting a cult to get people to give karma to out friend, an NPC Free Spirit. It took a long time to finally get around to getting a church and everything set up. Good times.

Another campaign, I was playing Nightshade (Physical Adept throwing playing cards). Nightshade was kind of the Astral expert of the group, as we didn't always have a mage. He learned most of what he know about the astral between runs with a free Forest Spirit that he befriended. He was running to gain influence and contacts and experiance to be able to launch a full scale war on Atzlan (he was Amazonian, and they killed everyone he'd thought of as family). So, he wasn't really a shadowrunner for money, so he always had alot lying around. For a run that we were on, we were supposed to steal something from a high level Hougun in Haiti. The problem was, we didn't want to fight him directly, and he rarely left his house. So, I decided to throw a party... This party had to be big enough that everyone would come, and if he didn't it would look bad. But we didn't have much time, and we couldn't find anyone who could (or would) supply us with enough alcohol by the time we needed it. So, I went and bought a large distillery outright (a couple hundred K nuyen) and drained everything they had into the party. Anyway, that was all just backstory... From then on, he worked at selling his newfound product back home in seatle and elewhere. Between runs one time, he decided to take his friends down to Haiti for vacation, so that he could check up on the company and make sure everything was running smoothly and get things set up for an expansion. We wrote out most of that vacation on a forum somewhere and it probably came to 40-50 pages in all. Other than that, he liked hanging out at Penumbra, and I think he was something of at part-owner by the end.

Basically, the reason that I like the characters that I play so much is because of their in-between runs lives. Many of my groups characters have had families and friends who ended up having influence on the story (One character's wife was killed when our J decided that he was upset with that character. That was kind of a dark campaign (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) ).

[Kerenshara]

Basically, the reason that I like the characters that I play so much is because of their in-between runs lives. Many of my groups characters have had families and friends who ended up having influence on the story (One character's wife was killed when our J decided that he was upset with that character. That was kind of a dark campaign (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) ).

These are always the characters and campaigns I remember most fondly, BECAUSE of the off-camera stuff.

[The Jake]

My last, long term SR character was a jack of all trades (de-facto hacker/rigger/shaman) who basically was a loner with obsessive/paranoid tendencies. He always kept to himself and built a very intensive information brokerage business over the matrix and almost never attended face-to-face meets. He would have liked to have that sort of lifestyle but he was so insular and obsessive, it just wasn't his way. I tried very much to play him as a loner. The closest company he had was his ally spirit and former running mate, an Elven Jamaican voodoo combat houngan.

I totally agree with Kerenshara - its the behind the scenes stuff that makes the character.

- J.

[pbangarth]

Lately I seem to have characters who have a 'quest' that draws them into the shadows.

I have an academic, Professor, who works in the shadows to find the thief who destroyed his career. But his passion is archaeology, and he cannot leave that behind, so he reads and anonymously contributes to journals. In the midst of the ugliness, he is determined to pay forward the help he got in past times, so he mentors strangers he meets along the way. And then there is Nandi, the sociologist in DC, who kinda likes him and...

Then there is Bongo Slade, the kid percussionist who dreams of finding the heartbeat of Gaia, and playing it. The shadows are means to money and experience, uncontrolled by teachers or parents or bosses. In downtime, he travels, to spend time with shamans in the north, or musicians in New Orleans, ever searching for clues. Or dropping into some bar and jamming, enthralling the audience but leaving when the bar overflows after Twitters of "Bongo's here!"

[Screaming Eagle]

My last long term Character (God's its been forever since I was a player) viewed Shadowrunning as a means to an end, not a job itself. Using a goodly sized crosssection of profits for runs he was working on setting up a "legitamite" construction company, planning on hiring himself as an architect (the characters carrer before the oh oh that got him in the biz). Much of his down time was spend scouting talent and lending aid to street level prospects who, when I got the ball rolling and could offer them a real job, would be loyal beyond belief (not manipulative, the character was just a good guy who engendered trust and helped people). Heck from time to time I'd call my fixers and announce I was taking a few months off and to only contact me if they were stuck or had a job that could be handled in an afternoon (the group was approaching prime runners by this stage, "real" missions often took 3-4 sessions and weeks of game time as we were going international). Sometime several sessions would go between missions as the team did side hobbies either together or individually. Life was comming up spades till we came back from a 3 week mission around Eurpoe, the Pacific rim and Madagasgar and I had had my apartment broken into, the police had investigated the break in (I was living in a good part of town by now), found my Lodge, a small stash of fomulae and some foci and poisons we had taken off of a Toxic Shaman I had yet to dispose of, jumped to all sorts of wrong but understandable conclusions and burrowed though several of my multipule layers of fake ID, contacts, allies and even shaken down a Barrens squatter tenament I had informally adopted/ was superintendant for. ALL WAS ASHES!!! Stupids shadowrunning!! Gah!!! the actual impact on my running was minimal (I hired 3 good teams to retreive the various items that could be mystially linked to me while I layed low, re-established fake id's and most of my wealth was secured/ stached safely)... but my network, my people my LIFE had gone to hell. It was great.

[Stahlseele]

One of my Characters is a dwarven professor/archeologist.
He's from germany.
He's looking for things like Hvaldos(subterranean Dwarven-Kingdom).
Yeah, those are not canon, novel only, so i figure he'll go bonkers.

[Cochise]

He's looking for things like Hvaldos(subterranean Dwarven-Kingdom).
Yeah, those are not canon, novel only, so i figure he'll go bonkers.

Unfortunatley not just in novels ... but (IMHO luckily) still not official canon

[edit]
As for the main question:

It largely depends on the characters and the gaming groups. I have never played in very fixed groups but rather several at the same time. Some of these groups restricted their roleplay solely to the runs and "down times" where mentioned in regards to rule mechanics at best (healing times, time it takes to produce certain game effects like initiation, programming and the like). Other groups (or at least individuals within certain groups) did put a stronger emphasis on the completeness of their character's life ... which resulted in gaming sessions that purely dealt with their ordinary lives and thus pushing the actual running experience into the background.
I also noticed that the larger a group gets the less likely is it to see played out down times.

As a concequence I do have characters that have rather well fleshed out background stories and ongoing "life" besides their work as runner, while others are pure rule constructs that only seem to exist while the run is on. And I actually like both concepts of playing ...

[Snow_Fox]

We usually have well developed charatcers with interests and lives, detailing their residences and stuff. The GM's have actually used these interests and outside lives to develop adventures with contacts.

[Fresno Bob]

I usually try to give my characters hobbies and activities that flesh them out a bit. Most recently I've had an ex-military male street-sam who wrote harlequin romance novels as a side job for supplementary income. He had writing as an active skill, and every month made a skill test to earn money with it. He also liked to drink heavily and keep bonsai trees.

[martindv]

To mangle a famous book title: "Do de-sensitized hardened shadowrunners dream of awakened mutant sheep?"

The PC has no life. No background. Nothing but his stats. He is nothing but a killer. And his is the moment of the kill.

He loves that moment.

He sits in the dark, quivering, waiting for that moment.

[Kerenshara]

I usually try to give my characters hobbies and activities that flesh them out a bit. Most recently I've had an ex-military male street-sam who wrote harlequin romance novels as a side job for supplementary income. He had writing as an active skill, and every month made a skill test to earn money with it. He also liked to drink heavily and keep bonsai trees.

THAT's original. But I'm dying to know the "why" about the Bonsai trees.

You know, MartinDV, I was hoping somebody would at least NOTICE that joke about the book title...

[The Jake]

The PC has no life. No background. Nothing but his stats. He is nothing but a killer. And his is the moment of the kill.

He loves that moment.

He sits in the dark, quivering, waiting for that moment.

I am reminded of the cardboard cut out character from The Gamers for some reason....

- J.

[Fresno Bob]

Well the bonsai tree thing is just I think its an interesting hobby, so I had him be into it. Its also kind of fun to pick hobbies that I don't know much about in RL, so I get to research them so the character can talk about it and be saying things that make sense.

[Kerenshara]

I am reminded of the cardboard cut out character from The Gamers for some reason....

- J.

You mean Mark's character, Somebodyorother the red, last of the Bloodfury Berzerkers, whose battle cry was "Blood! Death! and Vengeance! as he frothed at the mouth, but was so two-dee even the GM kept forgetting he was there?

[Kerenshara]

Well the bonsai tree thing is just I think its an interesting hobby, so I had him be into it. Its also kind of fun to pick hobbies that I don't know much about in RL, so I get to research them so the character can talk about it and be saying things that make sense.

OK, bonus points for this one then. Expand yourself while you expand your character.

I don't know ANYBODY who's done THAT. The fact that I wound up more and better versed in early biblical history and dogma than one of my co-workers who liked to think they were religious because of an Ars Magica character not withstanding.

[toturi]

To mangle a famous book title: "Do de-sensitized hardened shadowrunners dream of awakened mutant sheep?"

Off camera, there's always so much to do. Matrix? Your programs need updating. Vehicles? Your drones and vehicles need servicing. Face? You need to maintain your contacts. Day Job? Well, you have a Day Job. There's always something to occupy your time. Security Design? Well, there's a security industry convention next week. Covert Ops Protocols? Time to update them. There's always so much to do, so many people to see. Oh, you think your teammate just wasted a weekend gardening? He's keeping the fengshui in his garden just right. Remember that bad ass spirit he had on tap last mission? Yeah, good feng shui, man.

[tsuyoshikentsu]

In her spare time, Carrie works as a professional escort.

Not the "dinner-only" kind.

[Kyoto Kid]

...Violet runs an electonic "fix-it" shop on the side which basically maintains her lifestyle, Things like Trivids, Toasters, Nukers, and other small household appliances. In her spare time she tinkers with new and useful gadget concepts.